


Precedence

by Inevitable



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-04
Updated: 2014-07-04
Packaged: 2018-02-07 10:04:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1894950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inevitable/pseuds/Inevitable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Where Carson considers all that was to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Precedence

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jeslieness](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Jeslieness).



He doesn’t remember the first day they met, the day she walked into his life, and he does not deceive himself into believing it was love at first sight. Certainly not. They are not like that, they neither of them believers of romantic clichés, not anymore. No, they were a slow, gradual thing, a flower, watered and weeded until it bloomed. And while he had always acknowledged her to be pretty, he remembers distinctly the moment he first noticed her, the first time he really looked at her.

It had been one late evening during a house party, in her first year as head housemaid. Everyone had been exhausted that night, all their energy spent on keeping Downton afloat, what with their many guests and their outlandish demands. She had been appointed acting ladies maid at the very last minute for Mr. Patrick’s mother, something she had never done before. But she’d never been one to complain, to moan about her workload.

And so, always meticulous and efficient, she had stayed up long after the other maids had gone to bed, and he happened upon her in the laundry during his nightly rounds. She’d still been in her housemaid’s uniform, though her hair had come undone by then, and her apron tossed aside as she stood there, fussing furiously at a blouse.

Perhaps it was only because she looked so lovely in that moment, with those loose ringlets falling around her face, against her neck, that he remembers it like it was yesterday, or perhaps it was a foreshadowing of what was to come. Either way, this singular instance would serve as the memory preceding all others, of the woman who would then become his dearest friend, his greatest love. It would stay with him forever, quietly folded away in his heart. Would surface, perhaps, in music, with the notes of an earlier life, filed away there too, perhaps, would come, unleashed in those rare times he would not keep check on his disciplined mind. The image of her there, just that way, dimly lit in the gaslight and dashing away with the smoothing iron.


End file.
